Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [69]
For the Republican National Committee, the results were particularly upsetting. Despite all the money Aldrich, Crane, and others had raised to suppress insurgent candidates, conservatives prevailed in only three out of nine reform-minded states. Nick Longworth barely survived the anti-Taft turnaround in Ohio. Nationwide as at home, the voting pattern amounted to a rejection of everything Taft had stood for so far. He was shocked into a rare burst of metaphorical excess. “I should say, it was not only a landslide, but a tidal wave and a holocaust all rolled into one general cataclysm.”
The President was still, however, head of the Party, with immense reserves of patronage to help him rebuild his devastated landscape. Roosevelt, in contrast, was swept into political exile with a force that had analysts doubting he would ever again figure in national affairs. He had been humiliated in his own state, where Stimson lost to Dix by a plurality of 67,410 votes. Democrats won other key offices and both houses of the legislature. Young Franklin D. Roosevelt of Hyde Park became a Democratic state senator. Only fourteen Republicans were elected to New York’s thirty-seven-man Congressional delegation. Even Oyster Bay sent a Democrat to the House of Representatives.
Elsewhere, the results looked even worse for Roosevelt. Every candidate he had campaigned for had been defeated, while all those he opposed had won. Perhaps his worst humiliation was in Connecticut, where Judge Baldwin had been triumphantly elected governor. Less than five months after being welcomed home by a million New Yorkers, the Colonel was seen as human, vain, and fallible.
HE SECLUDED HIMSELF from reporters at Sagamore Hill, pleading that he needed a rest. This was true: since coming down the Nile he had been almost continually onstage. He was exhausted, sick of posturing and orating. “I am glad to think that I have Father safely caged at Sagamore,” Edith wrote Kermit.
Only one journalist was permitted to visit, on Sunday, 13 November. Mark Sullivan, the editor of Collier’s Weekly, was a good friend, and could be relied on to respect Roosevelt’s desire for privacy. More sympathetically than most, Sullivan understood the complex feelings of duty and desire that had reinvolved Roosevelt in politics. He had been at Harvard, observing, on that fateful day when Governor Hughes asked the returning hunter for help.
The big brick house was quiet, with double windows blocking more sound than cold, and all its children’s rooms empty, except the one Ethel still occupied, keeping her parents company.
“Don’t go,” Roosevelt said, when Sullivan made a move to return to Oyster Bay station. “The time will come when only a few friends like you will come out to see me here.”
“HE WAS EXHAUSTED, SICK OF POSTURING AND ORATING.”
Roosevelt reading on the North River ferry, New York, fall 1910. (photo credit i5.2)
Sullivan stayed on for some time, then again tried to leave. Roosevelt clung to him.
He suggested that I should not take the train from Oyster Bay but that the two of us should walk four miles across Long Island fields to another station on the main line, at Syosset. At the station, as we parted, he made me a present of the cane he carried, as if he wished to make some enduring seal of what he regarded as probably a diminishing number of his future friends. As I looked out the window of the car and Roosevelt waved a final good-by and turned back toward Sagamore Hill, I felt sorry for the thoughts I knew would accompany him through the four miles of winter dusk.
ROOSEVELT’S MOOD WAS not as melancholy as Sullivan imagined. For a few weeks, he alternated between bravado (“The fight for progressive government has merely begun”) and relief that a repugnant campaign was over (“I have never had a more unpleasant summer”).
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